Acclaimed architect elected an Honorary Fellow

Yasmeen Lari, the first female architect in Pakistan and a champion of sustainable architecture, has been elected an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College.

Yasmeen trained as an architect at the Oxford School of Architecture (now part of Oxford Brookes University). She then returned to Pakistan, becoming the first qualified female architect in the country. Lari Associates, the successful architecture firm that she founded with her husband, designed significant commercial and government buildings as well as housing for lower-income families.

Since her ‘retirement’ from conventional architectural practice in 2000, Yasmeen has focussed on humanitarian work. She is the co-founder and CEO of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, an organisation which works to conserve the nation’s historic art and architecture while providing humanitarian aid to local communities. Projects she has led range from large-scale planning proposals to mitigate flood and earthquake damage to the design of a clean-burning cooking stove with minimal carbon footprint.

Earlier this year, Yasmeen was awarded one of the world's highest honours for architecture, the Royal Gold Medal, by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in acknowledgement of her work championing zero-carbon self-built concepts for displaced populations. In 2020, she was awarded the Jane Drew Prize for her contribution to raising the profile of women in architecture and design.

Yasmeen was a Visiting Fellow at Jesus College and the Sir Arthur Marshall Visiting Professor in Sustainable Design in the Department of Architecture during the 2022-2023 academic year. While at Jesus, she gave a talk at the Intellectual Forum on her work rehabilitating flood-hit communities in Pakistan and her vision for the future of sustainable architecture.